Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money

I am a business owner myself, not coming from a high-income family. I am now part of a network of young entrepreneur/lending scheme for innovative business.

A wild guess: 75% of our alumni come from privileged environment: 50% from very wealthy family, 25% had parents who had intellectual jobs (parents were teachers for instance), and about 25% "others".

It's all anecdotal evidence, as much as your personal experience is.

From your "mother with 3 jobs" example: of course she teaches a lot to her children, of course she has merit! But their children won't feel like they have a "safety net" around them, be it strictly financial or not, provided by their background.

Wherever I like it or not, I know that if my business fails tomorrow, my family will be there for me. It can be conscious or not, but for many of "us" entrepreneur, we took a risk and consciously or not, we have a safety net.

As many have pointed out in this thread, the world is full of entrepreneurs who come from very little and make it happen.

To me saying "I have nothing" is just an excuse. Particularly in the US. If you want to make something happen, you can, it will not be handed to you, but you can.

What these studies never look at (because it is virtually impossible) are the massive numbers of businesses that start from "wealth" and fail miserably. I know people who were handed money and had no worries about failing. And, guess what, most of them fail. Why? Frankly, I don't know the exact mechanism. It has to be similar to folks who win the lottery and proceed to implode within a year or two. Or how about actors who make millions to shoot a movie in a few weeks and the best they can do with their lives in between movies is stuff drugs and alcohol into their bodies?

Nah, money may be a factor for some, but if someone doesn't truly want to be an entrepreneur you can throw millions at them and they'll just blow it.

Some of my favorite TV shows are "Kitchen Nightmares" with Gordon Ramsay, "The Profit" with Marcus Lemonis, "Make me a Millionaire Inventor" with George Zaidan and Deanne Bell and, of course, "Shark Tank".

I actually use them as teaching opportunities for my kids. We record episodes, watch them together and have discussions over dinner. The kids are good enough now that they can identify problems and patterns right away. Now we pause episodes and have discussions prior to the conclusions being revealed. The kids are getting a "virtual MBA" before they finish high school, which is great.

A common thread in a number of these shows are people who either inherit their businesses (lots of that in the restaurant show or The Profit) and proceed to run it into the ground. Almost nothing could be a stronger demonstration that money isn't a success factor in entrepreneurship than to see someone quite literally being HANDED a FULL WORKING BUSINESS only to proceed to destroy it. Why? Lack of focus, grit, drive, etc. All the qualities I mentioned in my prior post. I've seen shows where people end-up hundreds of dollars in debt because they simply had no engagement until someone from the outside slapped the shit out of them in a figurative way and got them to actually work on the business.

Money is just another tool, like 3D printer or a laptop. Millions of people have very expensive laptops. Most, from an entrepreneurial perspective, utterly waste them on Facebook and playing games. At the other end of the scale, a true entrepreneur with grit and determination can grab a second hand piece of shit PC, load Linux into it, use a bunch of free tools, learn to code and make something happen.

Entrepreneurship isn't about money.

The difference is that today you can build a side project on the side while working in a company and hopefully build something up that way. This wasn't possible 20 years ago in the same way.